The generation of previously young people in America who grew up protesting the state world they were about to inherit from their parents are now in the uncomfortable position of considering the state the world they are about to leave their children. So let’s take a moment to consider the leading economic and ecological indicators of the health of the country’s marine environment, including here in Maine.
The good news for the Gulf of Maine is that there have never been so many lobsters in the system. Probably ever—even before European settlers sent stories back across the Atlantic of lobsters so abundant you could find them in the intertidal zone simply by turning over patches of seaweed virtually anywhere along the Maine coast. Maine’s lobster catch has increased so dramatically in the past decade and prices have dropped to such inconceivably low levels for most lobstermen, there is even talk of unionizing parts of the Maine lobster fleet to bargain for higher prices. A union for the most ornery and independent small businessmen in America? That’s got to be an almost unbelievable economic indicator.
OK, so lobster prices are low, but the catch is higher—how big a problem could this really be? The story becomes more troubling when you learn that the lobster population in southern New England has collapsed. Lobster harvests off of Rhode Island and Connecticut have declined by about 90 percent in recent years because the waters there are too warm to support them. Shell disease is rampant among the remaining lobsters in southern New England—and the incidence of shell disease, caused by endemic bacteria that infect stressed lobsters, is moving north into the Gulf of Maine.
David Cousens, president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association speaking recently at the a session at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum said, “I don’t care what you call it, but the waters in Maine are getting warmer. I’ve fished for 40 years and I could set my clock on when shedders would start to show up—it was between July 17 and July 19—you could bet the farm on it. Lobsters shut down at temperatures lower than 40 degrees; but now the bottom doesn’t get below 40 degrees all year. And we have lobsters shedding year round.”
Chad Coffin, head of the Maine Shellfish Harvester’s Association, who has been clamming in Freeport for the past 28 years, believes the warmer waters are responsible for the great increase in green crabs on clamflats. Green crabs dine on baby clams—they eat them like popcorn. On many of the clamflats that have remained productive, harvesters have planted baby clams and then covered them over with netting to keep the crabs out until the clams are big enough to fend for themselves. Lest you dismiss the importance of the clam fishery consider this: last year the value of Maine’s clam harvest — $15 million–was more than seven times higher than the value of cod landings.
Meanwhile codfish have all but disappeared from Maine landings data. Last year when lobstermen caught $315 million worth of lobsters, do you want to guess what the value was of cod landed in Maine? About $2 million (not even one percent of the value of lobsters) — and that was roughly half of the quota the fleet was allowed to catch.The ground fish boats could not land the remainder quota because the cod were not there.
Unravelling the story behind the collapse of this mainstay of the Maine fishery would take more time than you have patience for, and besides is the subject of bitter dispute between fishermen, scientists, managers and environmentalists. But almost everyone agrees the cod are in deep, deep trouble.
Here is some even more stunning news: the surveys scientists conduct twice a year to estimate population levels detected no year one codfish. As much of a problem as overfishing of cod has been, the almost complete absence of an entire year class hints at something might be coming unhinged at a more fundamental level in the incredibly complex watch-works of the Gulf of Maine ecosystem.
What else is changing in the Gulf of Maine? Barney Balch, a biological oceanographer at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay, has been conducting phytoplankton surveys across the Gulf of Maine and has compiled a time series measuring the parameters that control the basic productivity in the Gulf of Maine, temperature, salinity, light penetration and so forth. Balch has recently documented that the Gulf of Maine is getting fresher. Of the eight wettest years in the Gulf of Maine, four have occurred since 2005.
What’s the big deal about heavier rainfall? The answer is that high rainfall pulses out a briny tea of humic acids from river runoff into the Gulf of Maine that is actually brownish in color and affects the composition of tiny one-celled plant life (called phytoplankton) both inshore and offshore.
Bill Mook, who runs a shellfish hatchery on the shores of the Damariscotta River and raises tens of millions of baby shellfish that he sells to growers all along the Atlantic coastline, has an idea of what these rain storms mean for his buisness. He carefully filters the seawater coming into the hatchery and during the spring typically has to change filter bags his seawater intakes every hour or two during the spring bloom to keep them from being clogged with plant life. But in the last 5-6 years, the hatchery typically goes a whole day without changing filter bags, which he believes to be a result of the intensification of runoff.
So warmer waters, more lobsters, more crabs, fewer clams, no cod, more rain… all of these observations of fishermen and scientists add up to a rapidly changing ecosystem in the Gulf of Maine.
The real difficulty of dealing with these changes is not to be able to discuss the fundamental issue that is driving these changes. Paul Anderson is Maine’s Sea Grant director, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington. He recently returned from an annual meeting of Sea Grant directors from all the coastal states around the country. He said one of the messages all Sea Grant directors got was: “You can use the word ‘climate’ and you can use the word ‘change,’ you just cannot use these two words in the same sentence.”
Until we are willing to look at the reality that is staring us in the face: that our carbon economy is altering the basic ecology on which so many jobs depend in the Gulf of Maine, we have no hope of finding solutions to our common problems. As one of the scientists said at the Maine Fisherman’s Forum, I can go to Washington and talk about my research and no one listens. But when a couple of red faced fishermen are in Washington pounding on the table, legislators start listening.